Saint Wenceslaus

"Good King Wenceslaus" of Christmas carol fame
wasn't really a king, but he was saintly and good. Perhaps born around 903 near
Prague, in
what is today the Czech Republic, young Wenceslaus
was the product of a mixed marriage. His father
Ratislav (the
Duke of Bohemia) was a Christian, while his mother
Drahomira came
from a non-Christian Slavic tribe.

Wenceslaus was raised a Christian by his
grandmother
Ludmilla. The grandmother (also a saint) had been the wife of the first
Christian duke of Bohemia.

When Wenceslaus' father died, his mother
took over Bohemia, and civil war broke out between the Christian and
non-Christian factions. Grandmother Ludmilla began urging
Wenceslaus to take over; hearing of the
sedition, Drahomira promptly had Ludmilla murdered.

The resultant power struggle ended in 922 with the teenage
Wenceslaus in charge of Bohemia, attempting to
bring together the warring factions.

As ruler, Wenceslaus attempted to reduce
the oppression of the peasants by the nobility. Opposition to
Wenceslaus among some factions of the nobility
intensified after he acknowledged
Emperor Henry I (the Fowler) of Germany as his overlord.

Wenceslaus' younger brother
Boleslaus
joined the opposition in 929, after Wenceslaus
had a son, thereby removing Boleslaus from the chain of succession.

Boleslaus invited his brother Wenceslaus to
a religious festival, and while Wenceslaus was
on his way to mass on the morning of September 28, Boleslaus and a group of
followers attacked him and stabbed him to death.
Wenceslaus' last words were "May God forgive you, brother."

Immediately venerated as a martyr, Wenceslaus
by the end of the century was celebrated as the nation's patron saint.

Wenceslaus Square is the center of
modern-day Prague, and became in 1989 the site of mass popular demonstrations
that helped topple the Communist dictatorship.

Although there is no historical record of the story recounted in the
Christmas carol, it is consistent with Wenceslaus'
concern for the poor. In the carol, Wenceslaus
and a page leave their castle to bring food and pine longs to a peasant on the
feast of SaintStephen (Dec. 26).

As the wind grows more intense and the night grows darker, the page fears
that he may collapse in the snow. Wenceslaus
tells the page to follow his steps, which, miraculously, warm the page's
freezing feet. Saint and page complete the trip to the peasant's home safely.

The youthful page's understandable fear of the bitter weather parallel's, in
a sense, what must have been the real Wenceslaus'
fears of attempting, as a teenager, to unite a nation divided by religious and
dynastic civil war.

Wenceslaus and the page both attempted to
pass through their respective storms by walking in the footsteps of
righteousness. That path led the page out of the storm, and
Wenceslaus into grave danger, and then to
sainthood.

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